How do we undo the gerrymandering? Could we just place a graph paper grid of equal sized squares across the map of the US and call each square a new voting district?
I remember when they pampered the Tea Party Movement.
I can only imagine and fear which more radical movement will be spawned to substitute these guys.
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And they haven’t had a new President win the popular vote since the 1980s.
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Independent redistricting commissions.
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The problem is that each district needs to be about equal in the number of voters. I agree that a grid that does not reflect the voting patterns of the population is a great idea, it’s not going to be equal grids, as there are some places where there are more people packed in than others. A grid wouldn’t be the same in Montana vs. NYC, for example.
They loved that movement, because they could claim it was “grass roots” (not really, it came out of an older anti-tax movement, but was generally funded by the Kochs, and tried to channel fears about a Black president).
I’m not sure you can get farther right than this, honestly…
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You’d think that would work, but not necessarily. Doesn’t this look reasonable?
Sure, but here’s how Daily Kos explained it (back in 2016):
Indiana Republicans held a six-to-three edge in the congressional delegation after 2010. They wanted to ensure they held onto the two seats the party gained in 2010—the 8th and 9th districts, while also flipping an additional Democratic seat they just barely lost that year, the 2nd. Like Maryland Democrats, Indiana Republicans drew a gerrymander with a modest but nonetheless clear partisan impact. However, unlike in Maryland, that didn’t require funny-looking district lines at all.
As with Maryland, the minority party’s voters (in this case Democrats) are inefficiently distributed geographically to produce proportional outcomes in Indiana. That lets Republicans rather easily pack Democrats into just two urban districts, the 1st and 7th, while they efficiently spread out Republicans among the remaining ones. All of the suburban and exurban counties adjacent to Indianapolis’ Marion County have a strong record of voting straight-ticket Republican and mapmakers shrewdly divided them among four separate districts to ensure that Republicans were not wasted in overly-red districts.
Doing so enabled Republicans to solidify their hold on the 9th district, which had previously contained only Southern Indiana and historically had been much more hospitable to Democrats. They also made sure to remove heavily-Democratic Michigan City from the northwestern edge of the 2nd in return for heavily-Republican rural areas further east. That enabled the party to successfully gain that seat in 2012, although by a narrower margin than expected in what was a relatively decent year for Indiana Democrats.
District 7 is the inner city of Indianapolis, so the Republican edges and suburbs are separated into 4 other districts to ensure all of those districts are solidly red, rather than wasted as part of the city they’re actually attached to.
District 9 includes the largest college town – Bloomington, main campus of Indiana University – but goes all the way down to the southern border, ensuring that those Democratic voters are diluted sufficiently.
District 1 magically includes all of the other largely Democratic voting populations (like Gary) by being stretched out to include just a smidgeon of LaPorte County…the only area in that county with Black people and liberal whites and thus more likely to to vote for Democrats.
So, sure, it LOOKS reasonable, but it’s actually very gerrymandered.
ETA: I forgot to mention that another major college town – South Bend, where Notre Dame is located – is in that huge District 2, again to dilute the Democratic voters in that one city.
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Yep. It still involves the classic gerrymandering “pinwheel” around a major city, to slice off chunks of urban liberals with masses of rural conservatives.
One key is increasing the House of Representatives so that there are fewer people per district. It’s a lot harder to slice-and-dice a population when it’s representing 25,000 people than 150,000 people.
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In a literal sense, you just make it illegal to have concave districts—convex polygons only.
You could even require them all to be rectangles.
Down in the weeds of case law, though, the problem is gerrymandering is both forbidden and required. “Keeping communities of common interest together” is a requirement, and that’s just another word for gerrymandering. That’s how each participant describes the particular gerrymandering that they approve of.
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